“I write for my school paper and I want to be a writer like you someday,” a high school junior named Evie told me last Friday. “But I have to transition first.”

I was just like Evie, a high school junior who happened to be a trans girl. I was a year into my medical transition, watching myself mature into the woman I always say myself embodying. But I had other dreams beyond settling my gender-body incongruity. I wanted to be a writer, and I struggled with balancing my dreams of womanhood with my career goals.

Hence, the duality of growing up transgender or transsexual for today’s youth, the theme of my talk as part of a panel of career trans women of color at New York’s Hetrick-Martin Institute.

I was wracked with nervous energy when I walked into the conference room, peppered with pink and white balloons and filled with about 50 young people who regularly seek refuge in the center’s after-school program. Ayana Elliott, a nurse practitioner who specializes in transgender health, was standing regally at the front, detailing the overall effects of hormone therapy.

I could make out parts of the chatter as a result of my entrance. Some teens recognized me from my It Gets Better video as I took a seat in the back of the room with Aaron, who was fussing with his camera ensuring he got shots from the event. “Oooooh, she’s fierce, darling!” I heard one young man in the back of the room snap.

It was then that I started pitting in my nude-colored sheath. Yeah, there goes my ferocity.

I felt guilty for being a distraction, as I was only a small part of Ayana’s “Woman in Me” program, a seminar she designed specifically to educate young transgender women about leading healthy lives. She and the center’s coordinator Bali White had invited me — along with America’s Next Top Model Isis King, Vivienne Morgan and trans activist Danielle King — to speak about my adolescent journey to womanhood and my subsequent career as a writer and editor.

The talk would mark my first time addressing an audience since going public with my story. While running my points through my head, I began fretting over my toenail polish and messing with the crown of my curls. I tend to fuss over the ridiculous in times of crisis. Then, my name was called, and I sashayed down the aisle to take my seat between the ladies. I thought, “What would I have wanted a career (trans)woman to tell a 15-year-old me?”

Vivienne kicked off the conversation, telling her story of transitioning while working in corporate America. She even detailed her own struggle of not fully knowing that womanhood was possible until later in her life. The teens applauded, then I heard my bio being read by Ayana, and I was up.

I opened with the truth: “This is my first time speaking and I’m a little nervous but so happy to be here.” The kids were kind, going into a chorus of “ahhhhs” as I fiddled with my fingers up front.

I relayed a dream I recently had about the boy next door, literally, who was the object of my teenage obsession. “He was a guy who liked girls and I was a girl who like boys but happened to be born a boy,” I said, garnering laughs from the audience. “Yet despite this glaring difference, I loved him anyway and the 12-year-old me wrote letters to the boy next door. Some were sent anonymously and others were kept in a binder I had, a binder that eventually became my very first journal.”

I wrote about him often, but the journal transcended my puppy love. I soon realized that I wrote about everything, including stories about my girlhood adventures with my best friend Wendi and elaborate fantasies about my would-be life.

“By writing things down, they became real to me,” I explained. “I became real to me, and he was just the catalyst, the beautiful inspiration that gave me an excuse to write, a reason to discover my true passion.”

I talked about how I survived before taking steps toward transitioning: I balanced my true self (the person I knew myself to be) and my false self (the front I put up in order to survive, blend and protect my truth) and the dreams that birthed themselves from the combination of the two.

After detailing my transition story, my move to New York, my career as a writer and editor, I left with one message, the one thing that my biggest cheerleaders had told me as a teen when all I seemed to care about was fully embodying my womanhood: “You are so much more than your circumstance. You are so much more than a transgender teen or a gay high school student. It’s just a facet that makes up the multifaceted beautiful being that is you.”

With that the camera phones were whipped out and I posed with the young people for the next hour before taking a tour of the center with Lillian Rivera, the director of after-school services for Hetrick-Martin. I learned that the Harvey Milk High School was only one facet of the center. Many of the kids that I spoke to weren’t even students at the high school; they merely sought refuge in the activities, the health resources and the supportive staff that validated their experiences of “otherness.” HMI is a safe, nurturing space for LGBT youth; a place of their own.

Hetrick-Martin ended up being the refuge that I didn’t know I needed before showing up on that muggy Friday evening. I walked in a young woman who had finally owned all of her history, all of her experiences, and left with sisters. It was the first time in my 28 years that I was able to seek an inherent, intimate bond with women just like me. Ayana, Bali and Isis weren’t only healthy, outgoing women, they were also trans women of color striving to make a change in our community which still has a difficult time accepting the LGB community, no less the even more “foreign” concept of being transgender.

From the media portrait that I grew up with, all that I thought existed were middle-aged white trans people, many of whom had the privilege of economy and whiteness (in our racist) to fund their medical transitions. I didn’t know that women like Ayana and Vivienne existed. And the problem isn’t just the media’s limited portrait of shock and awe, it was also our fault. We had chosen (for varying, layered reasons) to be silent for years (or what many call living “stealth”), we chose to blend into society as a means of safety because our race was struggle enough.

Finally, though, we were visible.

In the week since spending time with these women and the youth of Hetrick-Martin, another trans woman of color, Lashai Mclean, was murdered in Ayana’s hometown of Washington D.C. She was only 23, and detectives are looking into the possibility that Lashai was the victim of a hate crime. Regardless of the findings of D.C. police, Mclean’s death is another glaring wake-up call for we trans women of color to challenge silence, disrupt “stealth,” and come forward.

Intolerance and ignorance have proven once again to be lethal, yet in the midst of this tragedy there is hope. Trans women like Ayana, Bali, Danielle, Isis and all of us who bravely prove to live visibly are helping to change the collective portrait of trans women everywhere. My hope is that by shedding our anonymity and being visible we can help educate our community about our struggle, our triumphs and most of all our humanity – and can inspire other trans women, like the girls we addressed at the seminar, when they’re ready and safe to come out and be fully seen.

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3 Comments

Loved the IGB video and thank you for being on this very important panel. You’ve touched and changed lives for the better. Keep up the good work. And keep rocking the nude sheath dresses, as they look fab!

Reading how your day went at the “Growing Up Trans” speaking engagement made me wish to add how I went through life as a young child of 7 on up being hopeful that I’d begin heading toward womanhood once I reached my teens,then realization set in my first year of puberty,my hopefulness shattered suicide began it’s grip upon my mind, I turned to prayer and internal chanting nothing worked; when my grandmother passed, just after her funeral we headed to center city philly to a small cute cafe call “Tea for Two” owned by my Aunt that my father several timed that day kept referring to as “Him,It, Fagg,ect…” I couldn’t understand why my other aunts and uncles always spoke so highly of her but not my father,It wasn’t til many years later in “91” when I started my first semester at Temple U. that it hit me, I was 25 at the time and in my first psych 101 course. We came to the part in our text that went over human sexuality and were told to avoid the parts of gender issue, I went through it anyway afterall; knowledge is power, right. As I was reading I felt as though I was reading about myself, but it kept calling the diagnosis “Transsexualism”, but to me growing up that term had always referred to a person born with both male and female genitalia and were almost exclusively sex-workers and being raised in a strict overly religious family setting. But! the criteria fit all the same. I began extensive research on the topic and anything that remotely related to it;then low and behold putting 2and 2 together I came to the conclusion my Aunt the one my father had stressed particular distaste for was transsexual, I immediately realized at the age of 27 my greatest discovery “It Was/Is Possible” for me to finally fix my gender incongruency. Without haste I tracked my aunt down took a deep breath and called her, we were on the phone for almost 25hours straight. She explained Everything from HRT to Sil injections, Everything including the potential dangers. It wasn’t til the age of just before my 30th. birthday that I started my second and much desired puberty into womanhood. Since then I’d done many speaking engagements similar to yours, describing everything from my months and years on HRT to Sil injections to my coming out in the work place, legally changing my name on my own without the courts to my family,my fiance and her family and friends reaction(s) to my transitioning stages. And here I am, alive and healthy as the true Me, witnessing other transwomen and transmen carving out what will eventually be known as “Trans-history” thereby creating positive role-models and greater hope for our younger up and coming youth. (tears running down my face) Thank You! :)

Gia – I am beyond beyond emotion, sitting at my desk during my lunch hour in tears. I’m always surprised by how similar yet unique our varying coming out stories are. I feel so blessed to be able to share mine and to have this platform that enables you to be open and share yours with me and the readers of our little tribe. I agree that we are history in the making and I am so proud to be out and visible and living transparently, owning the totality of my experiences. I applaud your Aunt for coming before us and leading the way for you and many of us who are still to come. Thank you thank you thank you for being you and for your endless support. I am in awe.

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